Clean Water Fund

After years of playing it on the cheap, lawmakers and Gov. M. Jodi Rell had agreed to spend $220 million over the next two years to replenish the state's Clean Water Fund.

Now, the environmentalists are back to holding their breath, as Rell and the Democratic leaders of the legislature play a game of chicken over the state's $3.2 million bonding package.

The sooner the game ends, the better. The Clean Water Fund is much too important to be left hanging while politicians in both parties strut and fret.

The fund pays for improvements in the state's sewage treatment plants, which sounds mundane. But in the long run, it pays for preserving the health of the state's rivers and saving Long Island Sound from a slow death.

The sewage treatment plants empty into rivers, and the rivers into the Sound, carrying whatever humans flush into them. Right now, that includes sewage that's far too rich in nitrogen. When it rains too hard, some big plants still overflow and release raw sewage into the rivers.

As a result, rivers like the Housatonic have nitrogen-fed algae blooms ever year. There's also a dead zone in the western waters of the Sound every summer, when the nitrogen overload contributes to a lack of oxygen there.

Connecticut has signed agreements with the state of New York to remedy this by 2014. The Clean Water Fund is critical to meeting that deadline.

The fund gives municipalities grants and low-interest loans to pay for the upgrades in sewage treatment plants, including reducing the nitrogen load in the effluent the plants release. Without that money, towns can't afford to pay for the upgrades on their own -- and nothing happens.

In the past year, the General Assembly played things on the cheap, reducing state allocations to the Clean Water Fund to nearly nothing -- actually, to nothing in 2005. As a result, the considerable gains the state has made to clean up its rivers and the Sound slowed.

There are legitimate arguments both sides can make in the fight over the bonding package. But there are also legitimate points that both sides can agree on.

The Clean Water Fund is one of those.

The sooner the fighting between the governor and the legislature ends, the sooner everyone who cares about the state's environment can breathe more easily.